MATERIALISM and EMPIRIO-CRITICISM

Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy

( Chapter Two: The Theory of Knowledge of Empirio-Criticism and of Dialectical Materialism. II )

6. The Criterion of Practice in the Theory
of Knowledge

We have seen that Marx in 1845 and Engels in 1888 and 1892
placed the criterion of practice at the basis of the materialist
theory of
knowledge.[1] “The dispute over the reality or
non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a
purely scholastic question,” says Marx in his second
Thesis on Feuerbach. The best refutation of Kantian and Humean
agnosticism as well as of other philosophical crotchets
(Schrullen) is practice, repeats Engels. “The
result of our action proves the conformity
(Uebereinstimmung) of our perceptions with the
objective nature of the things perceived,” he says in
reply to the
agnostics.[2]

Compare this with Mach’s argument about the criterion of
practice: “In the common way of thinking and speaking
appearance,illusion, is usually contrasted
with reality. A pencil held in front of us in the air
is seen as straight; when we dip it slantwise into water we see
it as crooked. In the latter case we say that the pencil
appears crooked but in reality it is straight. But what
entitles us to declare one fact to be the reality, and
to degrade the other to an appearance?. . . Our
expectation is deceived when we fall into the natural error of
expecting what we are accustomed to although the case is
unusual. The facts are not to blame for that. In these cases, to
speak of appearance may have a practical significance,
but not a scientific significance. Similarly, the question which
is often asked, whether the world is real or whether we merely
dream it, is devoid of all scientific significance. Even the
wildest dream is a fact as much as any other”
(Analysis of Sensations, pp. 18-19).

It is true that not only is the wildest dream a fact, but also
the wildest philosophy. No doubt of this is possible after an
acquaintance with the philosophy of Ernst Mach. Egregious
sophist that he is, he confounds the scientific-historical and
psychological investigation of human errors, of every
“wild dream” of humanity, such as belief in sprites,
hobgoblins, and so forth, with the epistemological distinction
between truth and “wildness.” It is as if an
economist were to say that both Senior’s theory that the
whole profit
of the capitalist is obtained from the “last
hour” of the worker’s labour and Marx’s theory
are both facts, and that from the standpoint of science there is
no point in asking which theory expresses objective truth and
which—the prejudice of the bourgeoisie and the venality of
its professors. The tanner Joseph Dietzgen regarded the
scientific, i.e., the materialist, theory of knowledge as a
“universal weapon against religious belief”
(Kleinere philosophische Schriften [Smaller Philosophical
Essays], S. 55), but for the professor-in-ordinary Ernst
Mach the distinction between the materialist and the
subjective-idealist theories of knowledge “is devoid of
all scientific significance”! That science is non partisan
in the struggle of materialism against idealism and religion is
a favourite idea not only of Mach but of all modern bourgeois
professors, who are, as Dietzgen justly expresses it,
“graduated flunkeys who stupefy the people by their
twisted idealism” (op. cit., p. 53

And a twisted professorial idealism it is, indeed, when the
criterion of practice, which for every one of us distinguishes
illusion from reality, is removed by Mach from the realm of
science, from the realm of the theory of knowledge. Human
practice proves the correctness of the materialist theory of
knowledge, said Marx and Engels, who dubbed all attempts to
solve the fundamental question of epistemology without the aid
of practice “scholastic” and “philosophical
crotchets.” But for Mach practice is one thing and the
theory of knowledge another. They can be placed side by side
without making the latter conditional on the former. In his last
work, Knowledge and Error, Mach says: “Knowledge
is a biologically useful (förderndes) mental
experience” (2nd Germ. ed., p. 115). “Only success
can separate knowledge from error” (p. 116). “The
concept is a physical working hypothesis” (p. 143). In
their astonishing naïveté our Russian Machian would-be
Marxists regard such phrases of Mach’s as proof that he
comes close to Marxism. But Mach here comes just as
close to Marxism as Bismarck to the labour movement, or Bishop
Eulogius[3] to democracy. With Mach such
propositions stand side by side with his idealist
theory of knowledge and do not determine the choice of one or
another definite line of epistemology. Knowledge can be useful
biologically, useful in human practice, useful for the
preservation of
life, for the preservation of the species, only
when it reflects objective truth, truth which is independent of
man. For the materialist the “success” of human
practice proves the correspondence between our ideas and the
objective nature of the things we perceive. For the solipsist
“success” is everything needed by me in
practice, which can be regarded separately from the theory
of knowledge. If we include the criterion of practice in the
foundation of the theory of knowledge we inevitably arrive at
materialism, says the Marxist. Let practice be
materialist, says Mach, but theory is another matter.

"In practice," Mach writes in the Analysis of
Sensations, "we can as little do without the idea of the
self when we perform any act, as we can do without the
idea of a body when we grasp at a thing. Physiologically we
remain egoists and materialists with the same constancy as we
forever see the sun rising again. But theoretically this view
cannot be adhered to" (284-85).

Egoism is beside the point here, for egoism is not an
epistemological cateogry. The question of the appartent movement
of the sun around the earth is also beside the point, for in
practice, which serves us as a criterion in the theory of
knowledge, we must include also the practice of astronomical
observations, discovereies, etc. There remains only Mach’s
valuable admission that in their practical life men are entirely
and exclusively guided by the materialist theory of knowledge;
the attempt to obviate it "theoretically" is characteristic of
Mach’s gelehrte scholastic and twisted idealistic endeavours.

How little of a novelty are these efforts to eliminate
practice–as something unsusceptible to epistemological
treatment–in order to make room for agnosticism and idealism is
show by the following example from the history of German
classical philosophy. Between Kan and Fichte stands
G. E. Schulze (known in the history of philosophy as
Schulze-Aenesidemus). He openly advocates the skeptical trend in
philosophy and calls himself a follower of Hume) and
of the ancients Pyrrho and Sextus). He emphatically rejects
every thing-in-itself and the possibility of objective
knowledge, and emphatically insists that we should not go beyond
“experience,” beyond sensations, in which connection
he anticipates the following objection from the other camp:
“Since the sceptic when he takes part in the affairs of
life assumes as indubitable the reality of objective things,
behaves accordingly, and thus admits a criterion of truth, his
own behaviour is the best and clearest refutation of his
scepticism.”—[G. E. Schulze, Aenesidemus oder
über die Fundemente der von dem Herrn Professor Reinhold in
Jena gelieferten Elementarphilosophie [Aenesidemus,or
the Fundamentals of the Elementary Philosophy Propounded by
Professor Reinhold in Jena], 1792, S. 253.] “Such
proofs,” Schulze indignantly retorts, “are only
valid for the mob (Pöbel).” For “my
scepticism does not concern the requirements of practical life,
but remains within the bounds of philosophy” (pp. 254,
255).

In similar manner, the subjective idealist Fichte also hopes to
find room within the bounds of idealistic philosophy for that
“realism which is inevitable (sich aufdringt) for
all of us, and even for the most determined idealist, when it
comes to action, i.e., the assumption that objects exist quite
independently of us and outside us” (Werke, I,
455).

Mach’s recent positivism has not traveled far from
Schulze and Fichte! Let us note as a curiosity that on this
question too for Bazarov there is no one but
Plekhanov—there is no beast stronger than the cat. Bazarov
ridicules the “salto vitale philosophy of
Plekhanov” (Studies, etc., p. 69), who indeed
made the absurd remark that “belief” in the
existence of the outer world “is an inevitable salto
vitale” (vital leap) of philosophy (Notes on
Ludwig Feuerbach, p. III). The word “belief”
(taken from Hume), although put in quotation marks, discloses a
confusion of terms on Plekhanov’s part. There can be no
question about that. But what has Plekhanov got to do with it?
Why did not Bazarov take some other materialist, Feuerbach, for
instance? Is it only because he does not know him? But ignorance
is no argument. Feuerbach also, like Marx and Engels, makes an
impermissible—from the point of view of Schulze, Fichte
and Mach—“leap” to practice in the fundamental
problems of epistemology. Criticising idealism, Feuerbach
explains its essential nature by the following striking
quotation from Fichte, which superbly demolishes Machism:
“‘Youassume,’ writes Fichte, ‘that
things are real, that they exist outside
of you, only because
you see them, hear them and touch them. But vision, touch and
hearing are only sensations. . . . You perceive, not the
objects, but only your sensations’” (Feuerbach,
Werke, X. Band, S. 185). To which Feuerbach replies
that a human being is not an abstract ego, but either a man or
woman, and the question whether the world is sensation can be
compared to the question: is the man or woman my sensation, or
do our relations in practical life prove the contrary?
“This is the, fundamental defect of idealism: it asks and
answers the question of objectivity and subjectivity, of the
reality or unreality of the world, only from the standpoint of
theory” (ibid., p. 189). Feuerbach makes the
sum-total of human practice the basis of the theory of
knowledge. He says that idealists of course also recognise the
reality of the I and the Thou in practical
life. For the idealists “this point of view is valid only
for practical life and not for speculation. But a speculation
which contradicts life, which makes the standpoint of death, of
a soul separated from the body, the standpoint of truth, is a
dead and false speculation” (p. 192). Before we
perceive, we breathe; we cannot exist without air, food
and drink.

“Does this mean that we must deal with questions of food
and drink when examining the problem of the ideality or reality
of the world?—exclaims the indignant idealist. How vile!
What an offence against good manners soundly to berate
materialism in the scientific sense from the chair of philosophy
and the pulpit of theology, only to practise materialism with
all one’s heart and soul in the crudest form at the table
d’h(tm)te” (p. 195). And Feuerbach exclaims that to
identify subjective sensation with the objective world “is
to identify pollution with procreation” (p. 198).

A comment not of the politest order, but it hits the vital spot
of those philosophers who teach that sense-perception is the
reality existing outside us.

The standpoint of life, of practice, should be first and
fundamental in the theory of knowledge. And it inevitably leads
to materialism, brushing aside the endless fabrications of
professorial scholasticism. Of course, we must not forget that
the criterion of practice can never, in the nature of things,
either confirm or refute any human idea
completely. This criterion also is sufficiently
“indefinite”
not to allow human knowledge to become
“absolute,” but at the same time it is sufficiently
definite to wage a ruthless fight on all varieties of idealism
and agnosticism. If what our practice confirms is the sole,
ultimate and objective truth, then from this must follow the
recognition that the only path to this truth is the path of
science, which holds the materialist point of view. For
instance, Bogdanov is prepared to recognise Marx’s theory
of the circulation of money as an objective truth only for
“our time,” and calls it “dogmatism” to
at tribute to this theory a “super-historically
objective” truth (Empirio-Monism, Bk. III,
p. vii). This is again a muddle. The correspondence of this
theory to practice cannot be altered by any future
circumstances, for the same simple reason that makes it an
eternal truth that Napoleon died on May 5, 1821. But
inasmuch as the criterion of practice, i.e., the course of
development of all capitalist countries in the last few
decades, proves only the objective truth of Marx’s
whole social and economic theory in general, and not
merely of one or other of its parts, formulations, etc., it is
clear that to talk of the “dogmatism” of the
Marxists is to make an unpardonable concession to bourgeois
economics. The sole conclusion to be drawn from the opinion of
the Marxists that Marx’s theory is an objective truth is
that by following the path of Marxist theory we shall
draw closer and closer to objective truth (without ever
exhausting it); but by following any other path we
shall arrive at nothing but confusion and lies.

Notes

[1]Lenin is referring to Marx’s “Theses on
Feuerbach” (1845) and to the works by F. Engels: Ludwig
Feuerbach end the End of Classical German Philosophy (1388)
and the “Special Introduction to the English Edition of 1892” of
his Socielism: Utopian and Scientific (see K. Marx and
F. Bagels, Selected Works, Vol. II, Moscow, 1958,
pp. 403-05, 358-403, 93-115).